When adding a new feature to Checkly or refactoring some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda. The short story: Developer Experience trumps everything.AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impacts not only…
In a recent post on customer feedback I mentioned being a recent convert to chat widget-driven tools. I thought they sucked, but I was wrong. Since then, I actually switched from Drift to Intercom because Intercom's focus — support & communication — matched my business better than Drift's heavy sales focus. To…
Two weeks ago we released the public API for Checkly. This post is about what parts we needed to refactor, what parts we added and how we handled generating API documentation. More specifically, we'll dive into: Refactoring the existing Hapi.js based APIAPI key based authenticationRefactoring models with Objection.jsValidating…
When I started Checkly, all the typical SaaS things around billing, credit cards and prorating confused the hell out of me. I understood them from an intellectual point of view, but not really from an implementation point of view. Sure, I hooked up some payment providers (Adyen, Paypal) at previous…
If you run a SaaS, you probably want to show a user that he/she is almost running out of widgets. Or that he/she can get some cool feature on a more expensive plan. In this post we look at how implemented this in our Vue.js frontend application.…
How do you deal with what a user can do on their account in a SaaS app? Can Jane on the "Starter" plan create another widget when she is near the limit of her plan? What if she's a trial user? Turns out this is a mix of things Feature…
This is a run down on the basic multi-tenant SaaS data model underlying Checkly. Users, accounts, plans, that type of stuff. When building this, I found it surprisingly hard to find any solid info in the gazillions of developer and startup blogs; most were just to vague on the implementation…
2018 was an interesting year for Node.js frameworks and open source software in general. Developer communities discussed the role of corporate sponsorship and how to maintain a project used by millions but not supported financially. Similarly, security concerns were top of mind with some popular Node / JS packages being…